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illustration [ SHOWING, TELLING, AND COMBINING THE TWO ]

Showing versus telling is a constantly waged war in creative writing. And some of the battles have been fought in my classroom.

My students come to me from years of composition assignments in which they were not only expected, but required, to tell everything. And show nothing. So when they wander into Creative Writing, I have to attempt to pound into them many of the basic essentials of writing, one of which is to do exactly what they've been trained not to do. If I'm not successful, what I'll get for their first assignment will be a thinly disguised term paper, or a report.

Or I'll get a five-paragraph theme, that tired old plow horse that is fine when used for its intended purpose: to line up pieces of information and trot them out systematically. But it is a horribly ineffective structure for writing fiction.

The reason it doesn't work for creative writing is that it is pure reporting, which is almost completely made up of telling. Reporting is a fine mission, if you work for The New York Times. But, when you're writing your story or novel, you don't want to be a reporter, you want to be a storyteller.

It's time for another little dose of Flannery O'Connor here. “Fiction writing,” she tells us in Mystery and Manners, “is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things.”

Let's go back for a moment to To Kill a Mockingbird. Never on any page in that novel does Scout, the narrator, tell us that Atticus Finch, her father, is a good man. But throughout the novel, we know it; at the end, one of the strongest images is his goodness. The author, Harper Lee, carefully gives us scene after scene in which Atticus' actions speak for themselves. She shows us his goodness constantly, and tells it never.

So you might expect the absolute rule to be Show, Never Tell! Always and forever. No exceptions.

The trouble is that for a writer there aren't as many absolute rules as one might think. There are certainly a few, like run-on sentences never being acceptable, and subjects having to agree with verbs (though even that one can be broken when writing dialect). But this matter of showing and telling refuses to be governed so strictly.

Once you locate that voice that we've discussed, or more correctly when you've polished the one that is already in residence, you'll be constantly determining when to show things and when to tell them. As your voice becomes more distinctive and your powers of description better, you'll show more than you'll tell. But — believe me — you will do both if your fiction ends up being any good. Remember, Flannery O'Connor didn't say that fiction writing was never a matter of saying rather than showing, she said it seldom is. O'Connor was a wordsmith of the highest order; she wouldn't have used seldom if she had meant anything else.

In this chapter, we'll look at several examples to see how other writers have primarily shown or told or — more commonly — used a combination of both. We'll dig into the examples to see exactly what they did to make them work, and we'll pay special attention to the fine-tuning they employed to bring them fully to life. Then we'll look at a few ways that you can sharpen your skills, when tackling description and setting, at combining showing and telling.

But, first, let's determine the distinction between the two.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHOWING AND TELLING

Consider this statement:

A good time was had by all.

Now, spend a moment with this paragraph from Toni Morrison's novel Sula:

Old people were dancing with little children. Young boys with their sisters, and the church women who frowned on any bodily expression of joy (except when the hand of God commanded it) tapped their feet. Somebody (the groom's father, everybody said) had poured a whole pint jar of cane liquor into the punch, so even the men who did not sneak out the back door to have a shot, as well as the women who let nothing stronger than Black Draught enter their blood, were tipsy. A small boy stood at the Victrola turning its handle and smiling at the sound of Bert William's “Save a Little Dram for Me.”

A question: Which of the two descriptions on page 63 does more for you as a reader?

I'll bet you chose the longer one, unless you're one of those people who likes to be different just for the heck of it — one of those go-against-the-grain sorts.

But the point is this: In terms of what we end up knowing about this celebration, they both do exactly the same thing. We end up, both times, realizing that a good time was had by all.

So, why should we opt for the longer one when the snippet fills the bill?

Because brevity doesn't usually fill the bill for a writer or — much more to the point — for a reader. The guy in Sheboygan, unless he's addicted to condensations of novels, wants elaboration. He wants to know about those feet-tapping church women and that jar of hooch that got poured into the punch to help things along.

The big difference between these two examples isn't that one is considerably longer. It's that the most essential image, a sense of universal enjoyment, is not specifically mentioned at all in the longer one.

The first version is telling, the second is showing. We know that all of the participants in Morrison's paragraph are enjoying themselves because we watch them doing it.

Showing rather than telling is part of the magic that you have to work as a writer; in fact, it's one of the most vital parts. Your reader has to make his way through your story or novel — and then finally come away from it — with a sense of the characters and the settings and the situations that must have seemed to occur naturally. To use a sewing metaphor: You have to stitch your images together so meticulously that the seams are invisible.

One of the most effective ways to pull that off is to let your reader experience things rather than be told about them, to feel them rather than have them reported to him.

In Black Rain, Masuji Ibuse's novel about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, this sentence does not appear:

The city suffered significant damage in the blast.

But this paragraph does:

Among the ruins, the reflection of the sun on the pieces of broken glass on the road was so strong that it was difficult to hold your head up as you walked. The smell of death was a little fainter than the day before, but the places where houses had collapsed into tile-covered heaps stank vilely and were covered with great, black swarms of flies. The relief squads clearing the ruins seemed to have been joined by reinforcements, since I saw some men whose clothes, though bleached with frequent washing, were not soiled with sweat and grime as yet.

Again, as in the example from Toni Morrison's novel, we get the pertinent information in the first version. But we see and hear and touch and taste and smell the experience in the second. The difference between the two accounts is something like the difference between an accident report that a patrolman would write and the sensation of being in the accident itself. If you've ever been in one, you know that the curt, factual summary is worlds away from the reality of experiencing it.

“The city suffered significant damage in the blast” is too cold, too distant, and too all-inclusive. So what Ibuse does is drive home the image in small details, one after the other, throughout the novel. Pay attention to the delicate pictures here, almost like miniatures arranged on a wall: the reflection of the sun on the pieces of broken glass, the collapsed houses, the smell of death. The swarms of flies. All bits and pieces of wordsmithing that add up to an inevitable conclusion: that the city suffered significantly in the blast.

In short, the second piece is considerably better. And it's better because it brings the reader more fully in.

Now, this is important — so heads up, please. The longer version is not better because it is all showing and no telling. It's better because it is both showing and telling.

Look back over it; “the reflection of the sun … was so strong that it was difficult to hold your head up …,” “The smell of death was a little fainter …,” and “… were covered with great, black swarms of flies” are all telling. But the overall effect of the paragraph is that it shows the reader how badly the city had suffered. And it makes much, much more of an impression than simply reporting it.

Your fiction has to be a balanced blend of both approaches. Just remember this: Your story shouldn't come off as a report, or a summary. Think about that car accident we envisioned a few moments ago. Would your reader benefit most from the patrolman's efficient, curtly worded account of the wreck or from the driver's or the passenger's emotions and sensations as it happened?

You know the answer to that one, even if you're the gotta-be-different, go-against-the-grain guy.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Remember the television preachers who could deal out fire and brimstone from the pulpit, holding themselves up as paragons of virtue? Then remember how we read about the escapades and scandalous behavior of some of them in the newspaper.

They didn't practice what they preached.

They didn't show what they told.

Take Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, who had no trouble presenting himself to the community as pious and stainless, all the while letting poor little Hester Prynne catch all that Puritan flack for a transgression of which he was equally guilty, or even more so.

Dimmesdale and those television preachers didn't remember something that you — as a writer of fiction — must never forget: Showing carries greater credibility than telling. And not just in your actions, but in your writing. Particularly in your descriptions.

The best way to keep your tale from emerging as a report is to mostly show, and, when you tell, to make the telling as carefully wordsmithed and polished as the rest of your writing.

WHEN TO SHOW; WHEN TO TELL

We'll spend some time now with a variety of writers, looking at how they used this combination in their work.

In her novel The Book of Mercy, Kathleen Cambor could have written this:

In addition to the potential risk and the possibility of notoriety, one reason he chose to become a fireman was that he liked the uniform, which his mother also admired. But his father was against the whole idea.

Which would have gotten the point across. But not nearly so effectively as what she did write:

He liked everything about the idea of being a fireman. The excitement, the danger, the chance to be a hero or a prince. The dress-blue uniform, dark serge, a knifelike crease down the center of each pants leg, patent-leather visor on the cap, in which a man could see himself reflected. “Very fancy,” said his mother. His father's eyes were wells of rage and disappointment. He spit onto the floor.

The short one tells us pretty much what we need to know to understand this part of the story. But the longer one — the real one that Ms. Cambor actually did compose — does far more than that. It takes us into the attitude of the character, into his sense of values. It shows us how he feels about becoming a fireman rather than telling us. And there is more drama and description in those last two sentences, about his father's reaction to it, than the author could have conveyed in a page or more of explanation.

Look a little further along at a bit more about how the character feels about his new job:

He learned to smell the smoke from blocks away, he watched for the sky to begin to lighten, as if from the tip of a rising sun. Each time, he felt his heart pound, his own heart filled his chest, it echoed in his ears until they made the final turn into the red-hot stunning light.

Here again the writer could have told us what we needed to know in fewer words. “His job was exciting” might suffice. Or if you want a little more detail: “His heart rate elevated when his truck approached a fire.” But the point is that your reader wants, in fact he demands, a lot more detail, not just a little.

Your characters, their situations, the basic logistics of your plot — how characters move from Point A to Point B and the chronological order of their actions — are all important to your story, essential in fact. What brings the story to life, and makes it all as real as seeing it happen for the reader, is your description. Showing these things, as opposed to simply reporting them, will be what finally makes the whole thing work.

Dig back into that last piece. Note the strong images of the lightening sky and the pounding of the fireman's heart. That's fine stuff that drives home to the reader exactly how this fellow is feeling at that moment, in that place. Because the reader has probably felt that way, too. Maybe when a family member was in an accident and he was rushing to the scene. Maybe in a war. Maybe when his teenager was three hours late coming home from a party and dozens of possibilities — all bad — had galloped through his mind.

In your story, you need to plug your reader into images like that — to situations and emotions he can relate to. That's difficult, maybe impossible, to do when you are telling the thing. But your images can ring soundly and true when you are showing.

Here's a smidgen of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, where Ruby, a mountain girl, has first arrived to help Ada, one of the central characters, on the farm she has inherited during the Civil War:

Ruby's recommendations extended in all directions, and she never seemed to stop. She had ideas concerning schedules for crop rotation among the various fields. Designs for constructing a tub mill so that once they had a corn crop they could grind their own meal and grits using waterpower from the creek and save having to give the miller his tithe. One evening before she set off in the dark to walk up to the cabin, her last words were, “We need us some guineas. I'm not partial to their eggs for frying, but they'll do for baking needs.” Even discarding the eggs, guineas are a comfort to have around and useful in a number of ways. They're good watchdogs, and they'll bug out a row of pole beans before you can turn around. All that aside from how pleasant they are to look at walking around the yard.

The next morning her words were, “Pigs. Do you have any loose in the woods?”

Ada said, “No, we always bought our hams.”

“There's a world more to a hog than just the two hams,” Ruby said. “Take lard for example. We'll need plenty.”

It is made abundantly clear, in this passage, that Ruby's knowledge of farming and farm life is extensive. And, at the end, it is just as obvious that Ada doesn't have a clue about such things. The author could have just told us that and been done with it. Ruby understood everything about the workings of a farm, about which Ada knew absolutely nothing. That's what the reader needs to know.

But what she wants to know is more than that basic fact. She wants to know more about the uniqueness of these two women and their situation that can never effectively come through in just the telling. This flowing catalog of the things Ruby knows slowly paints a picture of her in the reader's mind, one that the author continues to add to as the novel progresses.

Look at how Ruby uses words like “partial” and “discarding,” and the phrase “in a number of ways.” If we are paying sufficient attention, we begin to see that she's not your average bumpkin that wandered down out of the holler. Probably she's had some education; probably she's done some reading. And those possibilities add an interesting aspect to a character that could have been one dimensional, and stereotypical.

If the reader ends up liking Ada and Ruby, and if she ends up pulling for them in their struggles, it will be because the characters and the struggles have been adequately shown to her, not reported.

Notice, too, that all of this attention to corn crops and guinea eggs and tub mills and pole beans goes a long way toward establishing the rural, historical setting of the story. Remember, it is easy enough to tell your reader that we're on a farm during the Civil War. But it isn't enough if the reader is going to actually feel like she is there. You're going to have to work considerably harder than simply telling her. You're going to have to show her hundreds of little details, all of which finally add up to what an 1860s era farm looked and smelled and sounded like.

By the way, you might have noticed that Frazier plays loose and easy with old, established rules regarding quotation marks in particular and dialogue in general. For which we'll forgive him, as the National Book Award judges obviously did, when they gave him their award.

Look at how John Gardner first shows, then tells in Grendel:

No use of a growl, a whoop, a roar, in the presence of that beast! Vast, red-golden, huge tail coiled, limbs sprawled over his treasure-hoard, eyes not firey but cold as the memory of family deaths. Vanishing away across invisible floors, there were things of gold, gems, jewels, silver vessels the color of blood in the undulant, dragon-red light. Arching above him the ceiling and upper walls of this cave were alive with bats. The color of his sharp scales darkened and brightened as the dragon inhaled and exhaled slowly, drawing new air across his vast internal furnace; his razorsharp tusks gleamed and glinted as if they too, like the mountain beneath him, were formed of precious stones and metals.

My heart shook. His eyes stared straight at me. My knees and insides were so weak I had to drop down on all fours. His mouth opened slightly. Bits of flame escaped.

“Ah, Grendel!” he said. “You've come.”

The first longer paragraph shows us much about this dragon and his lair. In fact, if I asked you to make a list of every detail covered in that paragraph, it would take you a while. Then, in the second paragraph, Gardner curtly reports Grendel's reaction to it. The first paragraph floats along like a river of nicely wordsmithed images; the second is five short, to the point statements of fact — some more of that sentence length variation I pointed out earlier. Taken together, the paragraphs work very effectively to convey the horror that Grendel feels in the confrontation. It's a good example of showing and telling, from an author who knew when to do each.

Here's another example that effectively uses both showing and telling. Consider these two paragraphs from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles:

Mr. and Mrs. K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.

They were not happy now.

Notice that the word happy is never used in the first paragraph, the obvious intention of which is to convey that Mr. and Mrs. K are happy. In a mellow flow of pleasing, futuristic images, Bradbury shows us that this is the case.

Then, in the second paragraph, the image is brought to an abrupt halt with five words.

Bradbury, like Gardner, knows when to show and when to tell. Often, as in this example, the carefully constructed, elaborately detailed showing is the perfect setup for the sucker punch — for the change-up pitch. In baseball, a good pitcher will lull the batter into expecting the same offering every time, maybe one fast ball after another, until he throws a change-up — say, a sinker — to catch the batter off his guard. Good writers do that, too. The buildup calls for showing; the change-up is most effectively told, in the shortest, most matter-of-fact manner.

Let's look now at how Bradbury crafted that overall sense of happiness in the first paragraph before he negated it in the second. Consider the physical description of the couple, detailed images like fair, brownish skin and yellow coin like eyes. We get a good glimpse of them, even of their natures (soft, musical voices), in less than twenty words. Then we see the things they once enjoyed: the strange (to us earthbound folk) Martian things like painting with chemical fire and visiting in a speaking room with phosphorous portraits.

We are told these things, you might be thinking — and you are correct. But remember, the prevailing image that the paragraph gives us is that they were happy. And we are not told that. It is shown to us.

What we are told — in no uncertain words — in the second paragraph, is that they are no longer happy. The harshness of the fact is equal to the harshness of its telling. And while the author could certainly come up with a paragraph or two to illustrate their discontent, this blunt statement of it works much better.

Remember this technique when you're writing. There will be places in your story or your novel where careful, intricate showing will best be followed by rapid telling.

I'll bet good money that Bradbury didn't spend all of his time while writing The Martian Chronicles thinking “I believe I'll tell this” and “I think I'll show this.” Neither, certainly, did he flip a coin (a yellow one, like Martians' eyes) to determine whose turn it was: showing or telling. He instinctively knew when to do one and when to do the other. And so will you. As your story unfolds, both in your thinking and your writing, you'll find yourself making the show or tell decisions almost subconsciously, based on the particular need or circumstance.

But remember: show more than you tell.

DON'T TELL WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY SHOWN

The student manuscripts that make their way to the critique table in my classroom often contain something like this:

Martha Louise considered the three large teacakes in her hand. She thought of the yeasty sweetness of them, and how they would feel as she slowly chewed them, how they would taste, like sweet cream and butter and cinnamon. She even thought of the crumbling bits of them that would trickle down her face and the front of her dress.

Then she considered this pair of barefooted girls, standing beside the wagon. Their dresses had obviously been handed down through many children before them. Their big eyes were as empty as their stomachs surely were.

Martha Louise sniffed at the teacakes just once, then handed them to the girls. She was a generous child.

Here, the writer shows us how important these cookies are to this particular little girl, and how much of an impression is made on her by the two unfortunate children. The writer then hints at the internal dilemma for the girl as she sniffs at the teacakes, “just once,” before sacrificing them. Good job, all around.

But then the writer blows it.

If the reader doesn't understand — after all of that showing — that this kid is generous, then he just isn't paying attention.

That last sentence in the example is pure telling, and the difference between it and the bits of telling at the ends of the Gardner and Bradbury examples is that, this time, we've already been shown what is now being told. In good writing, that should never, ever happen.

The last sentence is clutter, which William Zinsser in On Writing Well calls the disease of American writing. And he's right; it is a human tendency to tell more than is needed. Specifically, in creative writing, to tell when we've already shown.

The best way to assess how you're doing in this regard is to ask yourself — every time you convey a new image or situation — if you have already shown what you are now telling. If the answer is yes, then you've got yourself a piece of clutter that needs to be disposed of. The delete key (or a good eraser) is close by, and it should be one of the most frequently used tools in your kit.

SUMMARY: A LAST WORD ON THE SUBJECT

What we've discussed in this chapter are ways to go about blending showing and telling in your descriptions and settings, in fact, in all of your writing. We'll look at using sensory description next and then many other things. But showing and telling will weave their way into most of what we talk about.

Deciding when to show and when to tell will become an instinctive process, if it hasn't already for you. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't stop pretty often when you're writing and ask yourself if a particular passage or image would work better in another way. And that other way, usually, is showing rather than telling, or vise versa.

Before we close, let's look at one last example, this time from a movie rather than a book or a story. Good movies tell their stories in images, too, just like good writing does.

There's a wonderful moment at the end of Out of Africa where the narrator, an old woman, looks back at her long-ago love affair with a fellow who died young. She wants to tell us, near the end of her long life, that she believes in the existence of heaven, of an afterlife.

But she shows us instead. Here's how:

She hears from an old friend back in Africa, where she has never returned after moving far away from there, that lions often go to her old sweetheart's grave on a hillside that overlooks vast plains. The lions lie on the grave, the friend reports, sometimes for several hours. Her sweetheart, dead for many, many years, had loved and respected lions.

“He would have liked that,” she tells us, in her old, tired voice.

“I'll have to remember to tell him.”

How insufficient it would have been for her to announce that she believes in heaven, and intends to see her lover again, probably soon. How wonderful to casually let it slip its way into her narration, as if she hadn't meant to tell the thing at all.

Which is, almost always, the precise difference between showing and telling.

EXERCISE 1

Choose a verb. Any action verb, that is. Make a list of several common verbs that are generic in their meanings. Words like walk, talk, and hit. Then take a few moments with each word and write down as many verbs or phrases that you can think of that are more specific. Your goal is not to create a catalog of more precise descriptions; instead, practice refining an action down to its clearest description.

By the way, after admonishing you regarding the use of the thesaurus earlier, I encourage you to use it here. Many of its offerings will be what you're looking for. Some won't. And you'll come up with some of your own.

EXERCISE 2

Think of some ways that you could show the things that are told in these short statements, then jot down a few notes on how you might go about it.

EXERCISE 3

Think about this statement: She told me about how wonderful Paris is.

I think you would agree that this, alone, doesn't go very far in describing someone's perception of Paris. And if you've got a good story churning along that has arrived at a point where one of your characters tells another one about Paris, “she told me about how wonderful Paris is” just isn't going to cut it.

So grab your journal and a pencil, and redo it. Elaborate. Turn this sow's ear into a silk purse. If you've never been to Paris, that can't be your excuse for not attempting this. I'm pretty sure that Ray Bradbury never went to Mars either. But that didn't keep him from writing beautiful, believable passages about Martian cities and landscapes and Martians themselves.

Take your image of Paris and put it to work. Put it into words.

EXERCISE 4

Here are some other telling statements that you might try to work into short compositions that show. Remember, avoid using telling words and phrases like feels, hears, sees, felt like, and smelled like.

You can, of course, come up with plenty of statements of your own. Try this. It will make you a closer observer of details and encourage you to show things to the guy in Sheboygan rather than report them to him in little summaries.